So, I was wasting time before going to bed last night, like, by setting up this site, and by playing Sokoban. KSokoboan to be precise. Now, I made it up to level 12 of David W. Skinner's Microban level set, which is rightfully said to be pretty easy. Well, level 12 wasn't, at least not to me. (I admit that that's embarassing, but who cares.)

So, I made it to the "I can prove this unsolvable" stage of puzzle solving. But since I reckoned that someone would have noticed that this level is unsolvable, my mind immediately went to cheating. Unfortunately, nobody had published move sequences to solve Microban. I was absolutely clueless as to how this level might be solvable, and I just had to know. So, I wrote a Python program to solve Sokoban levels. You'll find sokosolve.py and a few demo levels in the sokoban-solver module of my 2004-public arch tree.

The program itself has two nested applications of A*, a usable (but half-baked) heuristic and a complete game model. In just 215 lines. Python never fails to impress me. Attached to this story you can see a dump of the program solving the level that had me so confused.

While I was setting up this site late last night, I felt like something was wrong. I heard my wardrobe make aching noises, and the ground started moving. First slightly, then more and more. At the end, it felt like our house was swaying from side to side with an amplitude of at least a few centimeters. Pretty scary stuff. Turns out the source of this was an earthquake whose epicenter was actually quite a ways from Karlsruhe.

So, after spending an ungodly amount of time setting this up, I finally feel at home. Time to say something in here. Well, I should have been spending all this time working on my applications to the graduate schools which I plan to go to in the fall of 2005. My current best excuse is to see this as a breather from taking the GRE and the TOEFL this week. I'm feeling pretty good about the TOEFL, but my quantitative score on the GRE was 730--not all that great. I can't tell you how much I loathe doing calculations in my head. I hope that this blooper won't prevent me from getting into my chosen schools.

Josie's in Barcelona with Kathrin at present. Hope they're having fun. *wave*

Ok, so I'm in the process of setting up this site. I thought, ha, even Josie has a blog. So, for the times when content on my own site is few and far between (like...err...now), I should just syndicate her blog, so I'll be cool by association. Well, her blog provider, some site called getcrafty, decides that their users can't let others syndicate their stuff. Like they own her view on life, and all that she wrote. As the title suggests, proprietary=bad.

This reminds of when Yonni's (Josie's sister's) blog just went belly-up and they charged her $35 for just letting her download her own posts. (Josie: If you're reading this, consider yourself invited to blog here. You'll get your own site to mess with.)

Well, hi planet. Everybody has a blogjournal these days, so why not me? Let's get started.

Update 1: Did anybody notice how cool I am? My blog can be accessed using SSL. Damn secure, man. Damn, damn secure. (Actually, not any more since the site moved to Alturo.)

Update 2: Drupal is pretty fun to mess with. Highly recommended.

Update 3: I really can't get over this thing being called a "blog." I'll call mine a journal. "Blog" just sounds silly, sorry...